


Human Qualities

by badgerjaw



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Gen, THE MAYONNAISES ARE FIGHTINGGGGG, blood mention, darning, moral musings, religious doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:48:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23399467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badgerjaw/pseuds/badgerjaw
Summary: The seconds stretch out, languid as a sinner, before Colum returns to the table. He sits on the stool the cultist abandoned so that he could look Silas in the eyes in a way that he hasn’t done in years. The portrait of the Kindly Master seems prepared to mediate. Colum resists the urge to turn the portrait to face the wall, so he would not endure their weaknesses.
Relationships: Colum Asht & Silas Octakiseron
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	Human Qualities

Silas had always been a boy of inspiration.

Sure, Colum knew that he was a boy that you either loved or hated, but that’s a sort of inspiration of it’s own. Strong feelings motivated people more than naked words, be they written or spoken, after all, and the boy had been raised to stand out from the other devout within the Eighth House.

He inspired those who were lapsing in their faith to return through either the awe of his set example, all the more meaningful for his youth; or out of spite from his barbed judgement, some of it warranted, and sometimes, Colum felt, not. Silas could raise a concern after prayers regarding some small thing, and the other Brothers and Sisters would be whipped up into a heated discussion an hour later, reevaluating how such a small thing came to be. Over breakfast, the boy could say something markedly profound for his age—regardless of what that age may be—and Colum would hear it repeated later that evening in the shop where he picked up more yarn to darn his own pants with.

It was not unusual, all things considered. Silas’s mother was much the same, though she had learned some subtlety and nuance from her teachers. However, said teachers had died some years before the proper Eighth heir came about.

So, Colum had long since decided that he would need to be a distracting force for that kind of energy if it started down a dishonorable path.

It was easier when Silas was a child, when siphoning hadn’t started taking its toll on Colum’s ability to be as eloquent and sharp as he had been before. Silas did have a tendency of taking his word as gospel, instead of an exercise of critical thought or compassion, which, Colum supposed, was his own fault. It made the discovery that the adult closest in his life—and therefore every adult—was fallible and prone to flights of ego and vice all the harder on the boy.

As he looks at the boy, the young man, from where he stands at the door that the shadow cultist had made her most welcome exit through, Colum realizes that perhaps that moment had affected his uncle more thoroughly than he had thought.

The seconds stretch out, languid as a sinner, before Colum returns to the table. He sits on the stool the cultist abandoned so that he could look Silas in the eyes in a way that he hasn’t done in years. The portrait of the Kindly Master seems prepared to mediate. Colum resists the urge to turn the portrait to face the wall, so he would not endure their weaknesses.

“Do you seek to scold me further, Brother Asht?” says his necromancer.

“No,” he says simply. In his youth, he could have given orators from the Third and Seventh a good run for their money, and if he hadn’t been a perfect match, he would have left to study wordsmithing as ardently as he had studied his rapier-and-buckler technique. But as the years began piling on, Colum had discovered that he favored simple, unadorned words best, and that orators and sophists were, all-in-all, inconsequential in the long run. “I’ve done my scolding.”

“Then you seek my forgiveness for speaking out of turn in front of her?”

“No. I stand by my honor.”

Silas’s eyebrows return to their steep divot. Colum suspects he will eventually go into his thirties with the frown lines of a man twice that age. “Then we have nothing more to discuss.”

“No, we do,” Colum says. “When you offered tea to the Ninth, I assumed some divine inspiration had moved you to some compassion. None of that was compassion, Si.”

“No one of the Ninth deserves compassion.”

“A wad of lava spit up from a volcano does not ask to become a rock, but with inspiration a rock can become a weapon, or shelter, or be ground into sand. Compassion here could have won Gideon the Ninth over. Instead you foist vagaries on her, accuse the House she serves of atrocities on the word of a revenant—“

“A revenant that saw more than that family thought. Why else would she and her son have been killed?”

“Si, if morals alone could sway, then why would priests and stories be needed?” Colum sighs, and retrieves his darning. His hand shakes a little as he works another length of thread across the tear. “You threaten violence and spit on honor. It inspires an enemy of a cavalier, not trust and compliance.”

“I don’t care if the Ninth House trusts me,” says the boy. Color is returning to his face, high on his cheeks and smeared unevenly like blood sweat on his forehead. “Lytorhood is not a ground any of us should step upon.”

“The Lord has asked it of you.”

“The longer I’m here and forced to look upon those cultists, the more I am convinced that the Lord is as fallible as a common man.”

Colm pricks his finger at the confession and pinches the bead of blood between his thumb and finger before it can stain the fabric in his hands. “Are you having a crisis of faith then?”

“I wouldn’t call it that, Brother, I will always serve him.”

“It sounds like a crisis to me. You either doubt in the Lord’s myriad of compassion for the House that failed to shut themselves away to die, or you doubt that he sees a plan for them continuing to exist.”

“You are the one who taught me to think critically! Why do you pick now of all times to go against me?”

“Why do you pick now of all times to think critically? Are the heresies of the Ninth only intolerable when you can see their painted faces, or have you been bending your Elders’s ears about them all this time when I haven’t been looking?”

“Co—“

“Gideon the Ninth is no doubt returning to her necromancer’s side. Do you think we could really stop them both if the Reverend Daughter wanted to ascend? That is the challenge we face now because you...” Colum huffs around the word, the softness he feels for his uncle, this boy, at war with the need to treat him with the respect owed of a man. “... because you failed. You failed.”

Silas’s face goes fully red now and the desk chair goes clattering back on the wood that Colum has worked so hard to bring to a high shine.

“How dare you, Colum?” he says. He leans over the table, his hands splayed across the surface. “I do _not_ fail.”

“You don’t have her keys. What you have is her distrust. You have galvanized her completely against us.”

“If you hadn’t disobeyed—“

“If you had discussed your full thought process with me before even going so far as to _offer_ tea, perhaps this would have turned out differently.”

“You are my sword!” There were tears in Silas’s eyes now. Whether they’re from rage or frustration or betrayal, Colum can’t tell. The last time Silas had cried, at least in front of him, was when the fallibility of the adults around him had wounded him deeply. “You are to act as I bid! What else is a cavalier for?”

“Is that the impression you get watching the other adepts and their cavaliers as you have the past few weeks? Protesilaus the Seventh certainly lends credence to that impression, but it’s a stretch to say Magnus the Fifth was merely Abigail Pent’s sword. What of the Third? The Sixth? All the rest? Cavaliers are not just the swords of their adept, Si, but a partner! I should be a partner to you and not just a sword or a battery! Together we could do great things and yet I am as much in the path of your divine inspirations as those you turn them against.”

A few tears pock the surface of the table as Silas bows his head, hopefully at least momentarily chastened. Colum abandons his darning again, this time with more care than he had before. He stands and comes around the table, stopping briefly to turn the portrait to face the wall now, taking care not to scrape the wall with the heavy frame of it. Silas’s shoulder is small under Colum’s hand.

“I have done little to fix that way of thinking since we took our oaths, and we both are the poorer for it. I’ve done my best to distract you from the ideas you’ve had that you haven’t thought through, but I think you’ve known that for a long time now, haven’t you?”

Silas nods. He watches Colum from the corner of his eye, as more tears eke themselves out between his pale lashes. The boy looks worn out for once, the whiteness of him washed out and undefined like marble left out to melt in several seasons worth of rain.

“Well, then it’s no surprise that you haven’t asked me my opinion of anything,” Colum says. He brackets both of Silas’s shoulders between his hands, and he’s immediately struck by a memory from half a decade before, just a lightning strike of deja vu that strikes directly on his own private desire to do it all over and _do better_ than he had before. “I don’t expect that will change. Not overnight. But, Si, I think we both need to meditate on what happened today. Will you give what I’ve said some thought?”

Silas’s fingers curl under his palms until his knuckles turn so white that the contrast reveals the soft pink of blood suffusing his skin. The silence settles over them again, more clearly than ever revealing the shape of Silas’s pride seated as ever in its throne of God-given inspiration. But then again, Colum didn’t expect a yes. He’s thankful when no answer comes at all, and he drops his hands away.

He steps away, leaving the painting turned still, and takes up his darning once again. Silas eventually sits down again, pink around his eyes, but otherwise tearless again. Colum doesn’t know how to read anything about this situation anymore, so he just empties his mind and concentrates on each pull of the needle and the way the hole in his trousers is mended, bit by bit.

“I’ll give it some honest thought if you answer me one thing, Colum,” Silas says.

Colum gives a nod to show that he’s listening.

“If the Reverend Daughter came to you tomorrow to offer tea in my absence, would you go? And if you did, would it be out of your sense of compassion and honor, or would it be out of betrayal of me?”

He can’t help but feel like this was meant to be an easy thing to answer, and to Silas’s credit, the boy doesn’t react negatively to Colum’s silence. He just watches closely with the ‘correct’ answer written on his face.

“I would not go without first discussing it with you,” he says. “Admittedly, I would be curious as to what she would have to say, especially to me of all people. But considering the kind of information her cavalier got out of us, just by virtue of being here, it would be a valuable offer to takes seriously. For all we know, she might not actually want to ascend, she might feel the same as you.”

Silas scoffs hard at the last part, but otherwise has returned to his usual posture.

“That’s not compassion or honor,” he says.

“That lies in the approach. But is it a betrayal of you?” Colum asks.

“No... damn you, it isn’t.” Silas stands and takes his stool over to the writing desk, his jaw set and his fingers alighting on a fine pen. “Fine, I’ll mull over what you’ve said, Brother Asht.”

“Thank you.”

They sigh almost in unison, and say nothing for it, but for Colum it brings comfort.

Colum does his own meditation while he finishes the darning and gathers the materials to buff out the scrapes that the cultist and his uncle left in the floor. He does his best meditation while he keeps his body busy after all. His mistake through all these years becomes clearer more the floor returns to its unmarred glory, and as he turns the Emperor to face them again, a new resolve settles over Colum’s heart.

He puts the tools of distraction away, and tests the weight of the ones of inspiration in his hands instead.

**Author's Note:**

> I needed inspiration to break the ice for myself to write in this fandom, so I drew a tarot card to see if that would help. Ace of Wands. Ironic card to pull to say the least, but it’s one that deals with inspiration, growth, and potential. When reversed (upside down), it speaks of distractions, delays, or inspiration without follow through, which really got me thinking about Eighth House dynamics.


End file.
